June 13, 2008
too busy
Sorry to have been away lately. I've had a lot going on at church. Tomorrow evening we have a special worship service with music provided by Isaac Everett and his band. It should be a great time.
In other news, I ran into this post at one of the websites I haunt. It actually relates to our conversations about original sin and the afterlife/hell. Pelagianism may be a theological "progressiveism." I am not sure it needs to be the only way to progressiveism, but it makes for an interesting post. Though it does not make for a good movie.
Later day Pelagians can be seen in many present day progressive Christian churches. For example, Universalist commonly believe God is too good to condemn humans and Unitarians believe man is too good to be condenmed. New Thought Christian churches such as Unity and Religious Science believe that man has the ability to heal, as Jesus once did, thus the doctrine of free will lives and thrives in their minds and hearts. While the numbers of these believers may be small in contrast to so called mainstream Christianity, their impact has been well out of proportion to their numbers. For example, several American presidents have been Unitarians.How free will connects to inherent goodness is unclear to me. I tend to shy away from the Pelagian. I think people are born "mixed." We are not born wholly sinful or wholly good. We are people, always a mixture of both wheat and chaff. And somehow this does not keep me from being a progressive. But check out the post. The three comments that follow are lengthy, but interesting. Posted by tripp at June 13, 2008 06:32 AMMoreover the doctrine of free will and the belief in the basic goodness of God and of man, underlies the whole definition of the progressive movement, motivates people like ourselves to seek social equality and justice.
Though, it does seem very simplistic contrast in the post between Pelagius and Augustine, and Augustine sounds much more like Jonathan Edwards than any Augustine I have read. Based on a semester of study of Augustine I came to the conclusion that there is a big difference between what Augustine wrote and what popular Christian consciousness thinks is Augustine and Palagius. Even if we don't buy Augustine's whole view of sin and judgment and his is just one patristic view, there are still deep theological problems with Pelagious' view and little need to appeal to him.
Posted by: Larry at June 13, 2008 10:40 AM